


The Hundred Days

by youwilllovemylaugh



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Pre-Serum, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, WinterSoldier!Bucky, shrinkyclinks, tiny!Steve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-06 12:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3134042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youwilllovemylaugh/pseuds/youwilllovemylaugh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been almost a year since Steve last caught wind of the elusive Winter Soldier, and two since SHIELD dissolved. Never did Steve think things would turn up once he stopped looking. </p><p>A special shoutout to essieincinci, for whom this work is dedicated and by whom it is inspired! I'm indebted to you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [essieincinci](https://archiveofourown.org/users/essieincinci/gifts).



DAY 265.

The last reported Winter Soldier sighting, from what Steve could tell on his rebooted SHIELD-issue news tracker, had appeared in the papers nearly a year ago, from out of Baltimore. Three day-trips to the Berea neighborhood had brought Steve two things: several fairly credible witness statements detailing the sight of a hooded man with a strong build and a left arm that glinted under streetlamps, rushing away from a number of gang-related scenes of violence; and hopeful reports of a decrease in gang-related violence in the historically-plagued area as a result of this man’s presence. Since then, Steve had read through the tracker daily, scanning with a trained eye for unseemly or suspicious reports, sightings, or murmurs, and for nine months, he had found nothing. For nine months, his contacts in Baltimore had provided him with nothing further.

Three of those anxiety-ridden months left Steve with little to do but manically check the scanner and occasionally answer Sam’s phone calls, texts, or authoritative knocks at his front door. Another three of those months had been spent recovering, at Sam’s behest, through daily runs around the National Mall and weekly burgers eaten at Sam’s favorite diner downtown. Re-socialization, Sam called it, since Steve had holed up for so long.

It was at one of these dinners, late in February, that he had first brought up the idea of community involvement.

“You got the heart for it, man,” Sam had said between bites of medium-rare ground beef. “You’ve told me a million times before that you’re out of commission for a lot of stuff – government work, corporate stuff, nonprofit stuff. You don’t wanna go the UFC route, even though I still think you’d be awesome at that. And you don’t wanna do military work, since you don’t think you could promote patriotism this country, the way it is –”

“I can’t,” Steve said. “Not in good conscience.”

“Yeah. And you’ve got enough money to live without selling your soul, right? So, the only way I see it is that you do something like what I do.”

The corners of Steve’s mouth turned down around a bite of cheeseburger. “It’s been half a century since I’ve been at war, Sam. I haven’t seen half the stuff you and the other men and women who’ve served have seen.”

“You’re taking me too literally,” Sam said. He was getting fired up, had begun talking with his hands. “You’ve got a lot of time on your hands now that SHIELD is essentially defunct, and like I said before, you’ve got a big heart. You’ve been living in that apartment in DC for almost three years now, right? How many of your neighbors you know?”

Steve pressed his lips together; the only time he’d ever spoken to anyone in his building, he’d been turned down for a date and Nick Fury had gotten shot in his living room.

“Exactly,” Sam said, picking up on his vibe and trying to make a joke out of the situation. One of his, “I’ve got your number, Steve Rogers,” kind of jokes. The kind he always made when he tried to talk Steve out of a pitfall of self-pity. “So why don’t you … I don’t know, volunteer your time doing something? Make a couple of friends, do something good for your building. You’ve been talking for a long time about how this world isn’t yours. And you and I both know there’s a part of you that thinks once the metal man comes back, you’re gonna stop feeling that way,” Sam added, leaning forward and forcing Steve to meet his eyes. “See if you can get your mind off Bucky for a while. Maybe it’ll make you feel a little less…”

He searched for the word, and even though _hopeless_ fell on the tip of Steve’s tongue, he kept his jaw set until Sam uttered, “alone.”

“What did you have in mind?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t live there. But I can keep my ears open, if you want.”

Steve considered it for the rest of the meal, the idea settling in the top of his brain, each of his neurons carrying a small piece of it through the hour, until it had all disseminated, caught on his orbitofrontal cortex. Something about the idea was appealing.

They were leaving the diner when he finally spoke again.

“You know, before Bucky and I enlisted, there were news stories about how women grew victory gardens,” Steve said, staring at his shoes. “They got their kids involved, made it kind of a neighborhood game. My mother wasn’t around to do it, and Bucky and I were kind of old to join in, but everyone else always made it sound like a good idea.” He looked up at Sam through his eyelashes, as if that would shield him from whatever burst of reaction Sam was sure to have.

“I can help you make flyers to hang up around your building,” he offered with a smile.

 

DAY 273.

The great Steve Rogers Rooftop Garden project was incepted the following week. Sam and Steve had made twenty flyers with a gift card to FedEx-Kinko’s Sam never thought he’d use, and they hung them in the stairwells and lobby of Steve’s building. They slid the extras under the doors of people Steve had decided were kind and quiet, and then they hid in Steve’s apartment until Sam decided it was safe to head home without being pegged for stuffing flyers under people’s doors.

Sam had wanted Steve to throw himself into this headlong, so the meet-up date on the roof was scheduled for Saturday afternoon, leaving Steve the week to hit up Home Depot for supplies. His mother had never gardened, or even attempted to keep any plants alive, but Steve still thought of her as he chose the seeds he wanted to plant in his plot – eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers – all her favorites, all things she used to experiment with, all things she used to feed him specially.

The other participating residents had started off timidly, keeping mostly to themselves and the friends they brought to join in. It was Steve’s perception that no one in the building really spoke to each other outside of the casual, almost compulsory hallway nod of acknowledgment Steve was used to receiving and returning. They steered fairly clear of him, as well – he was, after all, a very large, very quiet person with dubious government ties, superhuman strength, and what Natasha had once called “classic good-looks,” and he had learned that these things usually made him intimidating to strangers – but he was amazed to learn, after a few weeks, that he really did feel less alone, even in the company of people who chatted animatedly with everyone else around him.

He began to notice things. Small things, at first, like how the people who lived on his floor began to recognize him, really recognize him, and smile. Or, how the single father upstairs with his two kids let them wave at Steve on the street, even waved himself. It was mid-May, and the plants had begun to flower, his tomatoes had begun to take form. He thought, while watering the garden one morning, that the plants had given everyone an example of how to grow.

Nearly two years had passed since he had heard from anyone at SHIELD besides Maria Hill. Nick Fury had disappeared, like he promised, and Natasha had remained remarkably absent from his news tracker, even in alias form, though Steve supposed he wouldn’t have any clue what aliases she was using these days. Two years had passed since he had done anything SHIELD-related, even SHIELD-adjacent; two years had passed since anyone had asked him to do anything even remotely requiring his full physical capacity. Aside from the tracker, and the occasional coffee with Maria, and his memories, the only thing Steve had that still tied him to SHIELD anymore was his physique: his weaponized arms, his easy four-minute miles, his lethal thighs and his powerful torso. He needed no help lifting two 50-pound sacks of manure over his head and carrying them upstairs, something he was sure was evident to everyone around him.

Yet, Steve’s neighbors had begun to think of him differently. Their smiles were less cordial, less friendly, and more admiring. Their waves were more genuine, excited, pleased.

So, it was only a matter of time before he started receiving help.

He had been in the lobby the first time it happened, in the process of transferring all the garden equipment replenishments from the back of his newly purchased pick-up truck to the rooftop. On his last trip into the building from the parking lot, someone held the door open for him – Steve recognized him as the single father from the floor above him. He gave the man and grateful smile as he passed him and entered the building.

“It can’t be fun to carry all that up to the roof on your own,” the man remarked from behind him.

Steve turned around. He had two 50-pound bags of soil on each of his shoulders; there were four more on the tiled floor at their feet. He shrugged. “I do it every couple of weeks. It’s no big deal.”

“Nah,” the man said. “If you’re doing it that often, then you’ve got to let me help.” He stooped, grabbed a bag with two hands and hoisted it, with difficulty, onto his shoulders. “Community cooperation, and all of that.”

He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, Steve could see, and while he worried for the man’s spine, which looked like it was going to give if he wasn’t careful, Steve allowed the man to help, so long as he walked ahead of him.

When they arrived on the roof, the man was sorely out of breath, and Steve had to fight a laugh. Long before Steve and Bucky became friends, Bucky and his other six-year-old pals had teased Steve for his asthma. The man’s wheezes brought back memories over a half-century old, of a little, wheezy Steve Rogers the world had known for only half as long as the memory was old. It was a strange nostalgia, he was experiencing, as if it were for an old lover, or a long-lost sibling, or a friend he hadn’t seen in years. It was a specific heartache.

“Thanks for your help,” Steve said. He stuck out a hand and tried to crush the swell he felt in his chest.

The man took his hand and shook it, twice, firmly. “No problem. I’m Keith,” he said. “I live in 4A.”

“Steve. I’m in 3-B.”

Keith nodded. “Which plot is yours?” He swung his body out, so that they could face the garden.

“That one.” Steve pointed to the small, rectangular, east-facing section he’d chosen. “What about you?”

“My girls and I have this one,” Keith said, and gestured to the one closest to them on the left side. “My youngest said she had a ‘good feeling’ about this one.”

They shared a laugh, and then Keith offered to help Steve bring up the other bags.

“Nah, you should get back to your daughters,” Steve said. “I’ve got this.”

Keith nodded, and Steve detected a sense of disappointment in his concession. “All right.” He gave a single wave, and headed for the door.

“Hey,” Steve called out. Keith turned around, his hand on the knob. “Next time I head out to Home Depot, I’ll see if you’re around. Sound good?”

Keith shrugged, then nodded his acceptance. “Maybe you can teach me a thing or two about picking topsoil,” he joked, and Steve laughed as he turned to organize the supplies.

“Hey.” It was Keith calling out this time. Steve turned his head. “You did a great thing up here, man. My girls haven’t stopped talking about how excited they are to finally plant.”

Steve straightened a little, surprised by the compliment. “Thanks,” he said after a brief pause, and then he watched Keith enter the stairwell and descend to the fourth floor. He felt the swell in his chest start glowing.

 

DAY 300.

Steve awoke with a start at 4:45 AM, and rolled out of bed with a delicacy he practiced so he wouldn’t wake up his neighbors with the sound of his hulking mass hitting the floor. Light on his feet, he stumbled to the bathroom, a pain in his chest he could only describe as familiar. He had been struck down with a cold these past few days, something he hadn’t been aware was still possible for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sick at all, though, if his fuzzy pre-serum memories served him, he had spent nearly all of his young-adult life ill in some fashion. He supposed it was nothing, but he’d canceled his date with Sam and stayed in his apartment for good measure.

The moon slanted in silver through the white curtain Steve had hung across the only window in the bathroom, and his eyes adjusted to it as he relieved himself. Instead of gray tiles along the baseboard, he saw pale blue ones; instead of gray paint on the walls, he saw the eggshell white to which he was accustomed.

When he turned to the mirror, however, he saw something he had only recently seen in his most insecure dreams: the narrow shoulders and skinny face of a pre-serum, Depression-era Steven Grant Rogers.

He didn’t exclaim or leap back from the image he saw reflected in the glass. Instead, he eyed himself with a weary malaise as he washed his hands, and welcomed himself to the 21st century.

           

He woke later in the day, sprawled out on his queen-sized bed as usual. It felt larger to him, somehow, and when he leaned up to pull his blankets up over his head, he remembered why: his legs, skinnier than ever, atrophied even, poked out from his too-large red boxer-briefs like two stalks of wheat. His chest, which no longer heaved with the hale breath of a healthy man, but instead whistled and struggled like leaves in a strong wind, was pockmarked and sallow-colored, his skin barely thick enough to hide his blue veins and purple arteries. He was road-mapped, wind-whipped, salt-scrubbed – his mouth was dry and his hands were chalky, like they hadn’t seen lotion or aloe since before he became encased in ice.

He pinched himself, once and hard, on the skin of his forearm, and watched as the skin instantly reddened, melted back into place like half-melted wax. Then he rolled over and called Sam.

"Hey, man,” he said, when Sam picked up. His voice was still his own, but it felt different in his chest. “You’ve got to come over here.”

“Everything all right?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Think so. But you’ve got to see something.”

“’Kay. I’ll head over after breakfast. You want some?”

Sam arrived with a saran-wrapped plate of eggs and bacon and French toast in tow, and nearly dropped it when Steve answered the door.

“ _What?_ Steve? Is that _you_?” His words were minced and pared with alarm and uncertainty.

“It’s me,” Steve said. “Regular, old me.”

He stepped back to let Sam into the apartment, but Sam didn’t make any movements.

“Is that going to happen to me too, if I come in there?” he asked.

“You taken any government-issued super serums? If not, I highly doubt it.”

“Hey, man,” Sam said, stepping over the threshold gingerly, “you don’t know. You could be under attack by some guy who can control the space-time continuum. And you don’t need any government-issue super serum to be affected by that.”

Steve shut the door. “You’ve been watching too much of that _Twilight Zone._ ”

They sat in Steve’s breakfast nook and waited while the gifted breakfast warmed in the microwave.

“So, you just woke up like this?” Sam asked, watching Steve with shifty eyes as Steve maneuvered his way around the kitchen.

“Yes, though I’m not sure Beyoncé would call this flawless,” Steve said. Sam smiled in appreciation; Steve’s cultural education had been thoroughly accomplished, thanks to him, after all. “I would, though,” Steve added, half under his breath.

“What’s that?”

Steve didn’t reply. The microwave beep intoned in his silence. “I’m not exactly sure I’m upset about this,” Steve said, as he turned to face the microwave door instead of Sam. “You know?”

“No, I don’t,” Sam said. “If this is what you were like before, doesn’t that mean you’ve got –”

“All the medical ailments to go with it?” Steve filled in. “Yeah, I guess so.” He pivoted his head around on the base of his neck a couple of times, felt his glands squeeze uncomfortably under the weight of his jaw. “But it’s not like I didn’t spent twenty-five years this way.”

“Wasn’t this serum supposed to last you a lifetime?”

Steve sat down with his breakfast. “You know anyone who’s lived too much longer than 95?”

“Good point,” Sam conceded. Steve ate, folding pieces of bacon into his mouth with serum-inspired abandon. In a few minutes, he was full, and half the plate remained. “What do you think made this happen?”

Steve shrugged. “Beats me. The lifetime thing is the most plausible explanation I have, at the moment.”

“Is there someone you could call about this?”

Steve gave a derisive snort. “I don’t think Nick Fury is listed in the Parisian yellow pages, exactly.”

Sam sighed.

“I mean,” Steve continued, “it’s not something to get all defeated about, I don’t think. It’s just kinda something I have to deal with.”

Sam eyed him suspiciously, and Steve let him. There was a part of his tiny yet cavernous chest that was bursting with a bitter excitement – this change could mean he was approachable again, this change could mean he was normal, this change could mean he could expect to grow old with Sam and Maria Hill, and not have to suffer the loss of more of his friends. This change could mean people would stop expecting him to be heroic, or a role model, or stand-up citizen of the United States. He could be as jaded and ornery as he pleased – he could remove himself from the supposed Symbol of Freedom image the government had so desperately tried to paste on him. Maybe he could even start making a real difference, and not just the kind borne out of a sour longing for the past and its familiarity.

“I guess,” Sam said. “Maybe you’ll get to sink into oblivion, like you’ve wanted to since SHIELD went kaput.”

The remark wasn’t bitter or biting, but the lining of Steve’s stomach felt as if it had detached itself and was curling up. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Sam, realizing a shift in the tone of their conversation, leaned forward rather suddenly. “I mean, you’ll still have me, of course. And Maria, probably, even if she’ll be in New York.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “But I guess … this might also mean the end of whatever searching I can do.”

“What do you – oh,” Sam began, before understanding. He pressed his lips together in a line.

Steve shrugged, then got up to put his plate in the garbage. A multitude of things had sped through his mind in the last five seconds, but his mind wasn’t as sharp as it once had been, and instead of understanding what was happening to him, Steve felt the tight clench of his knotted stomach loosen, begin to rearrange itself properly. All the grip marks and stress impressions he imagined to appear on the surface of his once-knotted stomach lining, like the results of an Indian burn, began to re-inflate, to wear out, to invigorate. It felt cold and sore and strange; he almost wished for it to re-knot, for the discomfort to come back so he could feel right again. Less empty.

“What’s going on?” Sam asked, as Steve returned to his seat.

“What?”

“You’ve got that thousand-yard stare going on,” Sam said. “And your shoulders look even narrower than they did a second ago, they’re so tense.”

Steve relaxed against the back of the chair, tilted his head back a little. “I … never asked for this.”

“To degrade?”

“To be super. To be an icon, or a hero, or a legend.” He closed his eyes. “I wanted to fight in the war, and that wasn’t any different from what a lot of people wanted back then.”

“So, this is a good thing, then. That you’ve degraded.”

“It would be.”

“What’s stopping it from being a good thing?”

“I _am_ an icon. And a hero, and a legend.”

“And?”

“And people have expectations for me.”

“Do they?”

Steve threw his body forward, so his forehead rested on his hands, propped on his elbows, which rested on the table. “Yes. And this will disappoint them.”

Sam was silent for a minute, considering. And then he said, “But you don’t care about _them_ , right?”

Steve peered at Sam through his fingers. “Come again?”

“It’s not them you care about here.” He waited, until Steve took his hands away from his face. “You know, there’s still stuff you can do without being super.”

Like that, Sam had waded through all the muddled, rapid-fire emotions that had plowed through Steve’s mind, and gotten at the heart of the problem. A weight had been lifted off of Steve’s shoulders – however small it was – and he felt himself physically lighten up. “He’s going to get away from me.”

Sam shrugged. “Isn’t there a chance he already has? When was the last time you heard anything about him? Wasn’t it Baltimore?”

Steve shot a brooding look out the window at the brick-lined street, where, almost two years ago, he had looked out and wondered where the man with the metal arm had disappeared to, whom he was working for, what he was going to do next. Two years had passed, and he was asking himself almost all the same questions.

“You’ve got something good going here, now,” Sam said, leaning forward to regain Steve’s attention. “Don’t sacrifice it for something you had that was good a long time ago.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mystery strikes Steve's rooftop garden. Stakeouts ensue.

DAY 350.

The weekend passed without so much as a change in temperature – a heat wave had made their Memorial Day Weekend unexpectedly sweltering, and though Sam had invited Steve to join in on his family’s annual barbecue, his illness and pre-serum susceptibility to fainting in hot weather had discouraged him from even getting out of bed.

An amount of guilt had also laid itself over his shoulders. This weekend was seed-planting weekend in the community garden, their third one, and Steve knew his absence would be noted, even if it was only by Keith, which, he realized, was a hopeful and likely misguided thought. He tried not to cling to it too much.

The heat passed with the weekend, and that Wednesday, Steve got out of bed, cooked himself a Sam Wilson-style breakfast, and hiked his tiny person up to the rooftop. In the past weeks, during the construction and cultivation period, Steve had spent most of his time between weekends organizing tools, sweeping spilled soil into bags, setting at right angles the wooden garden plots built by those residents who were less engineering-inclined. Yet, Steve had been able to take care of all that before he shrank – a realization that came to him with a wave of uneasiness – and on the way up the stairs he began to fret about the future of the garden’s upkeep. He would have to take it easy, do a little at a time, make a schedule and stick to it. He would have to find other things to do with his time – he wouldn’t be able to throw himself into the work as blindly as he once had, wouldn’t be able to throw away his inklings of caution and work with abandon. He might, he realized with an abhorrent churn of his stomach, need to start asking for help.

He had never been good at asking for help. His mother had instilled in him strict principles of self-sufficiency, and collaboration only when he truly couldn’t provide for himself. The only person for whom he’d ever tossed those principles to the wind was Bucky. Everything else, Steve had built and grown and earned for himself. But, as Sam had said, there was no use in intentionally trying to repeat the past, and as Steve opened the door to the roof with heaving breath, he tried to brainstorm ways of empowering the community without making himself seem needy.

When he opened the door to the roof, however, he found the garden in complete and total order. He blinked his eyes a few times – the sun was strong and he had forgotten his sunglasses in his apartment – but any idea of his that the garden’s orderliness was a sham was proven invalid upon more thorough observation. The bags of topsoil were piled neatly on top of each other in the rightmost corner, beside the large clay pots he’d bought for small fruit trees, which were stacked one inside the other in threes. The hoses, all four of them, were aligned by the runoff spigot on the left of the door, and were flanked by the watering cans Steve had bought as an afterthought, should the DC area experience a drought, or something. Signs for the composting bins had been written, laminated, and attached properly, with a list of acceptable items to use attached to every other bin. All the planting plots, which Steve had grouped neatly into four squares, in which four more square plots existed, had been spread out a bit more, given room to aerate and expand.

He took all of this in with breath more bated than he was used to. Everything looked so organized – though the plots had been squared and the composting bins set up the week before, much of the watering system had yet to be established, and the aisles had been cluttered with tools, bags of soil, and discarded seed packets. All of it was gone, put into neat piles, trashed, or, as Steve noticed with a particularly alarming drop of his heart, carefully arranged in a logical system, as the many gardening implements had been.

His first thought, cruelly, falsely, was that someone had done this to prove to him his own inability. A bitter tongue lapped at the pool of ire in the pit of his stomach, and his did his best to bite it while he gazed around, trying to deduce from the manner in which the system was organized who could possibly have done this. His gut immediately insisted Sam Wilson was to blame – he was, as far as Steve knew, the only person who knew Steve had been sick, or had de-serumed. It didn’t matter that Sam didn’t have access to the building without being buzzed in, or that he had a full-time job that likely wore him out to the point of not caring whether or not his friend’s community garden looked nice, so long as it was succeeding. Yet, the organizing system felt familiar to him – he recognized something about the preciseness of it that made him feel warm inside, less like he was being mocked for his situation and more like he should be grateful. That he should trust whoever it was who had done this.

Which brought him to Keith. Though he knew little about the man, he had liked him from the start, and his knowledge of single parents, which was largely influenced by, but not limited to, his memory of his mother, shed a favorable light on the possibility that Keith had dedicated whatever spare time he had to helping Steve out in his absence.

So, after taking final stock of the rooftop, Steve ventured back down the stairs two flights to the fourth floor. He knocked on the door to 4A, and waited a while, before realizing that Keith likely had a day job and his daughters were probably at school.

He returned to 4A after six, figuring that he wouldn’t interrupt them at dinner if he waited. Yet, when the door swung open, he was hit with the smell of boiling pasta, and it was not Keith as he expected, but two girls about half Steve’s height, one dressed as a cop and the other as a ballerina.

“Hi,” said the cop. “You’re Steve Rogers.”

Steve grinned. “Yeah, I am.”

“I’m Kate, and this is Becca,” the cop said, pointing first to herself and then at her sister. “We’re playing cops and ballerinas.”

“Oh,” Steve said, nodding. “How does that work?”

“Well, Becca’s the principal ballerina in the American Ballet Company and she’s secretly stealing money out of the ticket box so she can set up her own rival company, but I’m there to stop her because I’m a cop but also her sister and I don’t want her to go to jail.”

“That’s quite the game,” Steve said, squatting down to talk to them. He looked at Becca. “You’re a couple of smart gals, aren’t you?”

Becca nodded, blushing over a smile.

“Girls?” Keith rounded the corner, a worried look on his face. “Who’s at the – oh. Steve?” Keith leaned over his daughters. He furrowed his eyebrows as he gave Steve a once-over, but only said, “How’s it going?”

Steve stood up and shook Keith’s hand. He met his eyes, understood that Keith wasn’t about to bring up Steve’s missing foot of height or breadth in front of his daughters. They were going to play it cool. “Not bad, yourself?”

“Good, good, we were just about to have some dinner, right, girls?” Kate and Becca nodded. “Care to come in?”

“Sure,” Steve asked. The girls led Steve into the kitchen, which was almost identical in size to his own, but the mirror opposite. Keith followed behind them.

“So, uh, what brings you?” Keith asked, sitting the girls on one side of the table. He looked nervously at Steve. “Everything all right with the, uh, garden?”

“Oh, well, yeah,” Steve said, sitting down across from the girls. He folded his hands on the table and watched as Keith served them two small bowls of pasta primavera. “That’s actually what I came here to talk about.”

Keith nodded. The topic didn’t seem to faze him. “Pasta?”

“No, thanks,” Steve said. He waited for Keith to serve himself and sit down before continuing. “So, have you been up there recently?”

Keith chewed while making a circular motion with his fork. He was seated at the head of the table, to Steve’s right, and Steve made an instinctual move backwards as the fork wheeled close to his head. “We were up there this weekend, yeah. Didn’t see you, though.”

Steve smiled, happily surprised to have been missed. “I wasn’t feeling so well this weekend, actually.”

“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

“It’s no big deal. Happens to everyone.” He let them eat a moment, eyes falling on the girls in front of him, who were eating more quietly than he’d ever heard two children eat before. He wondered if they picked up on the weird stares their father kept shooting at the visitor in their kitchen, and decided it was better not to loiter than to appear as if nothing was off. “I was, uh, up there today to check things out, you know, since I wasn’t there this weekend, and everything was all cleaned up.”

This struck something in Keith – he glanced up sharply. “It was all clean?” Steve nodded. “That’s odd. We were there extra late on Sunday and the place was still a mess,” Keith said. “Right, girls?”

“Yeah,” Kate said. “We wanted the plants to be extra cozy in their new homes.”

Steve grinned at her. “That’s good of you. I’m sure they’ll be very happy.”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “I was going to clean up after we left, but we didn’t have time to clean up because it was bed time, and by the time I got the girls washed and in bed, I’d forgotten about it until I was leaving for work the next morning.”

“Huh.” Steve nodded, soaking this in. “Interesting.”

“Pardon?” Keith said, and Steve realized he was speaking out loud.

“Nothing,” Steve said. “It’s just … I didn’t think anyone else cared so much about keeping the space clean that they’d go ahead and spend extra time up there.”

“Well, you go up there a lot.”

“I meant besides me. I don’t really have anything else to do besides work on that garden,” Steve admitted.

Keith eyed him again, and Steve knew now that he was overstaying his welcome, his inexplicably smaller, sicklier person had only made his presence more enigmatic, and that made Keith uncomfortable.

Steve palmed the table and stood up slowly. “Well, that’s it, really. You were the only people I thought might have cleaned it up, and if you didn’t, that’s okay. Maybe someone else surprised me. Anyway, I won’t keep you from your dinner any longer.” He said all of this in one breath while he backed out of the kitchen.

“Okay,” Keith said slowly, standing to follow him across the kitchen and out to the living room.

“I’ll see you around,” Steve said, waving to the girls, who he could see over the two-sided counter installed in the separating wall.

He didn’t wait for them to respond, just closed himself in the hallway and hurried down the stairs to his own apartment in a flurry of embarrassment.

He hadn’t invited himself into a practical stranger’s apartment just to make uncomfortable conversation and awkwardly accuse them of doing something nice for him. He hadn’t gone there to make an ass of himself and maybe discourage whatever kind of friendship they had laid out the grounds for in the past couple of weeks. Of course Keith hadn’t cleaned up the garden – he was a single father of two young girls, after all, and he likely didn’t have any spare time to clean up near-strangers’ messes.

Steve returned to his apartment with a pinch in his stomach. He wanted to put the whole thing away – someone probably cleaned it for themselves, not for him, anyway – but there was something undeniably familiar about the gesture, about the smell of the air in the garden earlier that morning, about the feel of the rooftop under his feet. He was caught in the valley of the uncanny, and he couldn’t explain why.

 

DAY 352.

Steve spent the next two days watching. He no longer had perfect vision, or the keen hearing to which he had grown accustomed, but a quick look through his closet afforded him a pair of binoculars and a sun hat, which he guessed was going to have to do.

The next morning he woke early and set himself up with a camping chair on the rooftop in a remote corner, unseen by the stairs, the only point of access. Surely, anyone who knew about the garden – or cared about the garden – would be coming through the building, so they could work by the light of day. If he was quiet, he should be able to catch them.

But the first day, he saw no one. The door did not open, not even once. The neighboring rooftops were desolate too, as far as Steve could see with his binoculars. Around eight o’clock, just after the sun had set, he rose from his camping chair and did a lap through the garden, to be sure he had not missed anything. The others’ plants were growing well, looking hardy and green. He stopped at his own plot, opposite the stairs. There was room for twelve plants, but Steve had only bought nine seeds, figuring that he didn’t have to feed a family, only himself. But when he inspected his plot, he found three more plants growing among his – beans, peas, and lettuce.

He squatted down for a closer look, feeling only on the verge of uncertain panic. The plants were new, smaller than the ones he had planted himself, packed tight in dirt he was sure had not come from the MiracleGro bags stacked in the corner. He looked around, as if doing so would give him more answers, and then rose from his squat, feeling his weak heart threaten to beat out of his skinny, fine-boned ribcage.

He left the rooftop in a hurry and locked himself in his apartment, a rush of weird energy following him like an ambient cloud. Why would anyone plant more vegetables in his plot? What kind of vandalism was that? And cleaning up the place, instead of tearing it down? He could think of a hundred better ways of wreaking havoc than whatever this person was doing. If they were even trying to wreak havoc, which, given the evidence, was something only his bored, food-deprived brain was trying to tell him after a long day of borderline paranoia.

The next day, he camped out again, this time with adequate snacks and reading materials. By four, there had been nothing, not even the stirring of the wind, and when he left to get ready for his weekly date with Sam, he tried to leave his slight disappointment behind him when he closed the door on the rooftop for the night.

           

“Why do you look like you’ve been fighting with a windmill all day?” Sam asked when Steve walked through the door of their prescribed diner.

Steve ran a hand through his hair, self-conscious. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Sam chuckled. “Glad to see the chip on your shoulder wasn’t affected by this whole shrinking thing.”

Steve frowned and hid his face behind the menu, even though he knew he was going to order the same cheeseburger deluxe with cheddar and pickles and fries with ketchup like he always did on Fridays. He wasn’t prepared for Sam’s glib attitude, not like he usually was, at least. He wasn’t sure why. But he kept his face hidden behind the menu until they were waited upon, and the menus were taken away.

“So,” Sam said, taking a large sip of his table water. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve been doing all day, or am I going to have to get on my knees and beg?”

“I’d like to see that.”

“You know I’ll do it,” Sam said, a light in his eyes that made Steve feel dangerous. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, and then Sam began to slide down off his booth seat, and Steve threw out his hands.

“Fine, fine, fine, okay,” he said, quickly, while Sam giggled as he hoisted himself back into the seat. “There have been some weird things going on in the garden, lately.”

Sam cocked an eyebrow. “You got too much time on your hands.”

“I knew you were going to say that.” Steve continued, though, filling Sam in about everything, from the mysteriously familiar feeling he got while walking around up there, to his visit with Keith and his daughters, to the stakeouts he’d held, to the extra plants. Their food came and their waiter left, and it sat growing cold as Steve spoke, Sam listening closely like he did with his therapy clients.

“You sure you looked at the right plot?” Sam asked, as he picked up his burger. Steve followed suit and dug in. “I mean, it’d been a couple of weeks since you’d been up there.”

“I know which one I picked, Sam. That’s not the point,” Steve said between bites. “This person has to know me. Whoever is screwing around up there _has_ to know me. Or, they’ve at least been watching me these past couple weeks, or else how would they know which plot is mine?” He sipped the Coke their waiter had brought him and wiped his hands on his paper napkin. “And who the hell plants extra plants in your plot and tries to call it vandalism? ‘Hey, I don’t like what you’re doing here, why don’t you have some more spinach’?”

“How do you know it’s vandalism? What if it’s some kid trying to earn his ‘help a senior citizen’ Boy Scout badge?”

Steve shot him a look, and Sam laughed.

“I’m just saying,” Sam said. “Maybe this person isn’t trying to mess with you.”

Steve considered this. They ate in silence for a while; it wasn’t exactly comfortable, as Steve could almost feel Sam planning something across from him.

When the check came, Sam threw his half of the bill on the table and said, “Listen.”

Steve glanced up. It was his turn to pay the tip, and he was counting ones out of his wallet. “Yeah?”

“Are there lights up on the rooftop?”

Steve blinked. “You mean by the garden?”

“Yeah. Are there lights up there? Because, I was thinking,” Sam said, leaving a pause for dramatic effect, “what if this person isn’t doing this in the daytime?”

“Who would garden in the middle of the night?” Steve asked incredulously. “You can’t see anything.”

“I don’t know. Someone with a headlamp. Or bioluminescence. Or really, really good eyesight.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “That person’s got to be really dedicated to this, then. I can’t imagine someone would be _that_ dedicated to messing with me.”

Sam smiled as if he knew something. “What are you doing tonight?”

 

They headed up to Steve’s rooftop after dark with a flashlight, a thermos of coffee, and a paint can for Sam to sit on. The plan was to stake it out, Captain-America-style, until something happened.

“If I was gonna do something like this, I’d do it on the weekends,” Sam said.

“Why?”

“More time. Plus, everyone who’d get me in trouble would probably be out somewhere else, doing something good with their Friday nights.”

Steve felt a pang of embarrassment in his chest. “You’ve got a point.” He poured them each a cup of coffee, and Sam settled onto his paint can.

Hours passed. The few times Sam tried to initiate conversation, Steve would remind him – “Sam, _Sam_ , this is a stakeout, you can’t talk” – and he’d flap his hand and shut up. By midnight, he was asleep, slumped against the concrete wall of the stairwell. The caffeine had clearly not worked on him, but Steve felt its effects, like bright white lights flashing through his dark red insides. He was alert, wary, sitting upright in his camp chair as if a nun was about to walk around the corner and threaten to rap his knuckles with her ruler. He was aware of every shadow, every change in the light landscape in front of him.

And then, suddenly, he wasn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our mystery vegetable planter makes an appearance.

DAY 353.

When Steve woke up, it was light out. The right side of his face was warm from sun. Sam, still out cold beside him, was snoring.

He looked around – there wasn’t anyone on the rooftop just yet, thank God. There was no explaining away “hi, my friend and I here were just hosting an overnight stakeout because I noticed some extra spinach in my garden and became suspicious” without alienating people, even if he told them about his and Sam’s training in tactical military procedures.

He nudged Sam, whose snores halted abruptly as he stirred.

“Wha –?” Sam said. He looked around and then put his face in his hands. “Damn. Sorry, Steve. I’m guessing we didn’t catch him.”

“Nah,” Steve said. “’S’all right.”

Sam groaned as he stood up, and together they packed up their belongings and headed down to Steve’s for breakfast.

When they reached the fourth floor, they ran into Keith, who was leaving his apartment with his daughters.

“Hey,” he said when he saw them. He quickly hid his look of confusion upon seeing Steve’s new skinny form again. “Girls, say hello to Steve.”

“Hi, Steve,” the girls chimed.

“Hi,” Steve said. “This is my friend Sam.”

Sam and Keith exchanged pleasantries. “Showing him around the garden?” Keith asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Steve said. He remembered their gear. “And we sat up there and had a little breakfast,” he added hastily. “It’s a nice day out.”

“Oh, good, we were just heading out to the park,” Keith said. “Can I interest you in tagging along? You can bring Sam.”

Sam and Steve looked at each other, and then back at Keith. “I’ve, uh, actually got to get going,” Sam said. “But next time, for sure.”

“All right, then,” Keith said. “Girls, say good bye.”

They did, and then they bounded down the stairs, Keith following along behind them.

“You think it was that guy?” Sam asked, once they were outside Steve’s apartment and Keith was out of earshot.

Steve shrugged, fitting the key in the lock. “I haven’t ruled out anybody yet.”

Sam laughed as Steve pushed open the door to his apartment. When Steve flipped on the light, he was accosted by the sight of a dozen squash, of various sizes, colors, and kinds, sitting on his kitchen table.

“What the hell?” Sam exclaimed. “You on some kind of squash kick, or something, man?”

Steve stood in the doorway, motionless, while Sam craned his neck around him to see inside. “Definitely not,” Steve said. He entered the apartment cautiously. “I locked the door last night when we left, right?”

“Think so.”

They put their stuff down gingerly by the front door, and then scoured the apartment for bugs, signs of a break-in, shoe scuffs on the floor, fingerprints. There was nothing. They regrouped by the kitchen table.

“Where in the hell did all this squash come from?” Sam asked. “You haven’t even had the garden long enough for this to grow, right?”

“Nope,” Steve said. He picked up an eggplant and turned it over, found a sticker on its underside. “These are store-bought.”

“Who in their right mind buys a dozen vegetables, breaks into someone’s apartment, and dumps them on their kitchen table?”

Steve put the eggplant down again. “You got me.”

Sam shook his head. “Do you even like squash?”

“Not particularly.”

“What are you doing to do with all of this, then?”

Steve looked at Sam. “Do you want it?”

“Hell no,” Sam said. “I don’t want none of your mystery squash.”

Steve laughed. “Can I donate it to someone? Will a soup kitchen take a dozen squashes I can’t account for?”

“You won’t get tax breaks on them without a receipt.”

Steve stared at them, hands on his narrow hips. He felt more like himself than he had in years, standing like this, in the middle of his kitchen, staring at what was quite possibly the most ridiculous, vaguely threatening practical joke he had seen since before the war.

They made breakfast around the mystery squash, and after they cleaned up, they gathered the squash in bags and made their way down to the soup kitchen, where the woman working at the reception counter took them without question.

“You want a receipt?” she asked, as they were leaving.

“Nah,” Steve said.

When they finished, they walked toward the park a few blocks away and found a bench by the pond to sit on.

“Do you remember anything that happened last night?” Sam asked when they sat down.

Steve thought about it. “We went up on the roof after dinner, and then we sat up there for a while, trying to figure out who planted those other vegetables in my plot.”

“Yeah, but what else?”

“You fell asleep at one o’clock.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “All right.”

“And … that’s it.”

“That’s all you remember?”

Steve thought about it. There was no sense of time in his memory, no recollection of time passing in the way that it had when he used to go on regular stakeouts. He couldn’t remember looking at the time and wondering how only five, ten, fifteen minutes had passed since he last looked at it, wondering about why his perception of time had changed, and what that meant for him. He couldn’t remember being bored at all.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s weird.”

“What’s weird?” Sam asked.

Steve explained further, and when he was finished, Sam’s eyes widened.

“You know what that means?”

“What?” Steve asked.

“Someone knocked you out.”

Judging by the look of suspicion on Sam’s face, Steve guessed he wasn’t the culprit behind this memory lapse. “Who would have done that?”

Sam shrugged. “Beats me.” They sat in silence a minute, thinking. “What if it was the same guy who planted those plants in your garden?”

“That’s one serious gardener,” Steve said.

“Maybe, but do you think it’s possible?” he asked. “Some wackjob or some homeless guy seeing an opportunity?”

“Why would he knock me out, though? If he explained, I’d have let him in,” Steve said. “Hell, I’d have given up my plot for him.”

“Pride,” Sam said. “Fear.”

“I guess.”

They were quiet again. Steve couldn’t imagine someone being intimidated by him, or afraid to ask for his help – especially now that he looked this way, the same way he had always pictured himself in his mind – but then again, Steve knew how hard it was to ask for help. He’d never do it, if he thought he could get away with it.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Sam asked after a minute.

“That you can’t believe anyone would be afraid of me?” Steve said.

Sam laughed. “A rose like you? Who in their right mind would be afraid of you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nah, but really,” Sam said. “What if this guy, who planted the vegetables and knocked you out, what if he’s the same guy who broke into your apartment and, well, planted the vegetables?”

Steve gave Sam a look.

“What? I mean, think about it,” Sam said. “There can’t be more than one lunatic running around foisting vegetables on people in your building.”

“But _why_?” Steve asked.

“Haven’t gotten that far yet,” Sam said. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? That this is, for whatever reason, all the same person?”

Steve considered it. He couldn’t imagine a team of people doing this to him, let alone a reason for someone to encourage a team of people to do this to him. But a single perpetrator was probably easier to imagine than, say, a cult of them.

“Who would do this?” Steve asked.

“It’s not me,” Sam said.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t know, man,” Sam said, laughing. “You’ve encountered a bunch of weirdos since you came back, haven’t you? Remember the woman from Boise who came out to DC to try to marry you?”

Steve shuddered at the memory. “That was a weird few days before the Secret Service found her.”

“Maybe it’s just a matter of time before they catch up to this guy,” Sam said.

Steve shrugged. “The Secret Service isn’t on my tail so much anymore. Not since SHIELD broke up.”

“True,” Sam said.

They traded theories for about an hour, sitting in the warm spring sun, until Sam had to get back to his apartment and get ready for a therapy session. Steve left the park feeling strange, as if he were half-asleep, his mind moving quickly from thought to thought, guessing at the circumstances that would lead someone to leave vegetables in a stranger’s apartment.

           xxx

The rest of the afternoon slipped by in the way most pre-summer afternoons did, slow and quiet and languorous. Steve scanned every inch of his apartment, looking for things that had been displaced and righted, or altered, or taken. Nothing seemed different.

He passed out on the couch around seven-thirty, unreasonably beat by the day. He was still getting used to the limitations of his old body, and as he dozed, he thought about calling a doctor, or seeing a nutritionist, or working with a personal trainer. He had advantages now, even if he was useless to the Avengers or to whatever remained of SHIELD, that he’d never had pre-serum. He could find a compromise between this body and the serumed one.

These thoughts blanketed his mind like a summer haze. He tossed and turned beneath them, fighting to stay awake and failing. He was only vaguely aware of the sun going down outside, only vaguely aware of the chill that was seeping through the window he’d opened earlier, to let some fresh air in. But he had slipped into a place where he had no control over his body, no willpower to get up and shut the window. So he fell asleep.

When he awoke, there was someone on top of him.

He started, jerking awake like he had been seared with an iron. The body above his did not move.

“Who are you?” Steve asked. His tongue was thick and dry in his mouth, and he worked it around his teeth to try to soften it up.

The person didn’t speak. It was dark outside, and Steve had the sense that much time had passed since he fell asleep on the couch. The window was now wide open, and his curtains blew in the breeze.

He shivered. “Who _are_ you?” he asked again. His eyes had not adjusted, and he could not make out the person’s face. All he felt was the warmth radiating from this stranger’s body. All he could do was fight the strange urge to curl up into it, leach it from him.

“I know you,” the stranger said. Steve curled his knees up into his chest and slid upwards into a sitting position. The stranger, who had been sitting on the couch in the crook of Steve’s knees, stayed put on the opposite side of the couch.

“How do you know me?” Steve asked. He remained calm, even as he remembered that the panic button Nick Fury had had installed in the apartment after he left for Europe was under his nightstand, in his bedroom.

“I … I don’t know.”

As Steve’s eyes adjusted to the light, he began to make out the brim of a baseball cap on the stranger’s head, with shaggy hair falling out underneath it. He inhaled through his permanently stuffy nose, which had only clogged further from the way he’d been sleeping, and flinched when he smelled something sour, something rank and terrible. “Where did you come from?”

“I’m not sure,” the stranger said. “But I know you.”

His eyes had always taken a long time to adjust to the dark, even with the serum, but the serum had at least made his night vision better than it had been, which was to say nearly nonexistent. He waited a long time before speaking again, trying to see if his vision would improve, but it didn’t. Instead, he became aware of a painfully familiar feeling low in his chest, one that radiated out to his fingertips, his kneecaps, his toes. He couldn’t place why it was familiar, or where it had come from, but it seemed to be pulling him toward the stranger sitting on the other end of the couch, whose breathing Steve could feel on his face.

“I think I might know you too,” Steve said at last. But as soon as he went to move closer to the stranger, he leapt up from the couch and bolted for the window.

“What?” Steve said. “Wait!” he shouted, when he saw the stranger go out the window. He followed him, and then stuck his head out onto the fire escape to see where he’d gone.

But he was nowhere. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air, and had yet to materialize again. Or, perhaps he had, but it was somewhere far away, far out of Steve’s impaired sight.

The feeling of familiarity in Steve’s chest burned like the last ember of a fire, slow and stubborn, for several hours afterward. He did not sleep again, but instead, he waited. He sat up on the couch and he waited, feeling himself cool off, shaking every few minutes from the rejuvenated adrenaline that coursed through his veins when he recalled that, for the second time in twenty-four hours, his apartment had been broken into, and that he might know who had done it.


End file.
